.png)
4 months ago
4
Ever sleep 8 hours, drink your 2 liters of water, hit the gym a few times a week, basically do everything “right”… and still feel off?
That was me.
Some days, I felt sharp. Energized. Like everything clicked.
Other days? I was foggy, drained, useless.
I tracked everything. Tested every habit. Nothing stuck.
One day caffeine helped. The next, it wrecked me.
One week I slept great. The next? Same routine, no results.
No pattern. No clarity. No progress.
Apparently, feeling great is harder than building a startup.
So I started digging. Was I doing something wrong? Or just missing the full picture?
That rabbit hole consumed months. The deeper I went, the more frustrated I got. Eventually I realized the problem might not be me.
Maybe I wasn’t optimizing. Maybe I was just placeboing harder.
The Backstory
I’m River, co-founder of Pulse. Before building this, I spent years obsessing over my own performance.
I’ve spent over $50,000 on trackers, wearables, supplements and plans. My entire life became a science experiment. Some days I felt on top of the world and others I felt worse than when I started! Here’s everything I’ve learned and how it could help you become healthier:
When it comes to pro-active health management, the problem today isn’t lack of data. We can track everything from our glucose levels to sleep stages.
Actually, for the first time in all of human history, we’re able to monitor the 3 key elements of our lifestyle – sleep, activity, and heart – 24/7 in real-time. That in itself is a monumental feat which isn’t spoken about enough.
The challenge we have now is making sense of all of this data – and more importantly, understanding what impacts it.
Today we have more choices than ever in our daily lives. Whether it’s deciding what we eat, who we hangout with, what exercises we do, supplements we take or entertainment we consume. All of these choices have an impact on our health. Decision fatigue is real, especially when your job demands rapid-fire judgment, all day, every day.
The last thing I wanted after a 12-hour day was to run another decision tree. Eat now or gym first? Will that screw my sleep? What’s better? Who knows. I was too fried to care.
That’s why I’m building Pulse.
It’s not a health tracker. It’s a health tester.
Why Most Wearables Don’t Actually Help
Most wearables are built on a broken loop:
track → report → hope you figure it out.
They drown you in metrics, then hand you a vague score:
- Sleep: 74
- Recovery: Medium
- Stress: Elevated
Now what?
They leave the last mile, action, up to you.
You’re told what happened, but not why.
You’re given advice, but no proof it works for you.
It’s health theater. Data without direction.
I didn’t want another summary of my body. I wanted a way to study it.
That’s what Pulse does. It doesn’t just track. It tests.
How is Pulse Different?
Yes, Pulse tracks your sleep, energy, habits, and movement, just like any other wearable, but that’s just the surface.
The real goal: help you test what actually works in your life.
- Want to know if 2 cups of coffee are better than 3?
- If workouts in the morning help with afternoon focus?
- If no screens after 10pm improve your sleep quality?
- If waking up at the same time every day boosts energy?
With Pulse, you can test that, and more.
Just pick what you want to try, and track how it affects your sleep, energy, and mood the next day.
Simple. Clear. Personal.
We built this to put you in control.
From Idea to Hardware Hell, and eventually… to Launch!
We started building Pulse in late 2023.
Our engineers have practically lived in the factories testing sensors, rewriting firmware, reworking materials until the product met one standard: it had to be something we’d trust on our own wrists, every day.
Eventually, through a lot of trial, error, and luck, we finally got to a design we were happy with.
Sidenote: When they said ‘hardware is hard’, they really should have emphasised the HARD!
Quietly, we opened early access in November 2024. Over 5,000 people joined us in this journey and pre-ordered the device.
Now, we’re only weeks away from shipping and launching Pulse to the rest of the world.
If you’re building your own blueprint for energy, clarity, and longevity, then join our waitlist at pulse.site
Let’s break limits.
– River
